Monitoring EMC PowerVault ME Storage system
eG Enterprise offers a specialized EMC PowerVault ME monitoring model that monitors the storage system inside-out and sheds light on current or probable performance dips that the storage system suffers.
Figure 1 : The layer model of the EMC PowerVault ME storage system
Every layer of Figure 1 is mapped to a wide variety of tests that monitor critical performance parameters such as processing ability, load, and operational state, of the core components of the storage system’s architecture. To pull out such useful performance data from the storage system, the eG agent needs to be configured to connect to the management controller of the storage system (via HTTP/HTTPS), where the XML API resides. The eG agent then runs XML API commands to collect the desired metrics. To be able to use the XML API, the pre-requisites detailed in Pre-requisites for monitoring the EMC PowerVault ME storage system
The metrics so collected would enable administrators to find accurate answers for the following performance queries:
- What is the operational state of the vdisk? How healthy is the vdisk at present?
- Is any vdisk slow in processing I/O requests?
- What is the level of I/O traffic on each volume?
- Is any volume not using its cache optimally?
- How healthy is each volume?
- Is any controller hogging CPU?
- How well are the controllers using their read/write caches? Is any controller cache under-utilized?
- What is the current status and health of the expander port of each controller?
- How healthy is the controller network?
- What is the current operational state and health of each host port?
- What is the current status and health of each controller?
- What is the level of traffic on each host port?
- What is the current status of each disk?
- What is the status of the LEDs available in each disk?
- How healthy is the disk?
- What is the current status of the expander and its SES elements?
- How many trap messages were sent from the EMC PowerVault ME storage system?
The Network layer of a EMC PowerVault ME storage system model are similar to that of a Windows Generic server model. Since the test has been dealt with in the Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document, the upcoming sections focus only on the layers pertaining to the EMC PowerVault ME storsge system alone.
